Wow, it has been crazy busy here at Perficient lately. That’s good for us, but bad for getting blog posts out in a timely fashion. I came across SharePoint: Is It Worth Using as a Collaboration Tool? posted by Joe Shepley (@joesphepley) at CMS Wire on March 29, 2011. In that article, Mr. Shepley argues that Sharepoint 2010 does not stand up well
against purpose-built social computing platforms. He acknowledges that Sharepoint was not built to be a social computing platform, but is mostly a content management platform with some social computing capabilities bolted on. That is a pretty fair assessment.
To the right I’ve included an image in which Mr. Shepley hightlights the areas in which Sharepoint works well (green boxes) and areas where SharePoint needs help (yellow boxes).
But, Mr. Shepley’s main question is can Sharepoint be a viable collaboration platform even with extra social capabilities added to it? Of course that depends on what kind of collaboration you had in mind. Here are his categories of collaboration and how Sharepoint 2010 stacks up:
| Category | Description | Sharepoint Y/N? |
| Document-based | Sharing files and lists | Yes, this is Sharepoint’s sweetspot |
| Conversation-centric | Quick, dynamic micro-blogging (i.e. my status) | Not so much. You will need additional software. |
| Community-centric | Sustained collaboration usually by Forums with active members | Not really a place for Sharepoint |
| Content-centric | Asynchronous collaboration by using tagging, ranking, and sharing content | Again, not a strong area for Sharepoint |
| Expertise-centric | Collaboration through reputation and activity tracking and searching for more than documents | Must add additional components to Sharepoint |
For the most part, I think his analysis is fine. I’m not sure I agree on his Community-centric view. I think one of Sharepoint’s strength’s is in its ability to quickly and easily create communities.
Any thoughts on using SharePoint as a knowledge management tool or as part of a knowledge management system? (specifically for a small company with frequently traveling employees).
If you think of knowledge management as sharing documents, then Sharepoint fits that model really well. However, we are now looking at knowledge management as a bigger sphere that would include things like expertise, activity streams, forums, blogs, etc. If you buy in to this view of knowledge management, then I think you will need to supplement Sharepoint with some other tools.